Every evening in San Diego, men from all over the world row ashore. One evening, Dana counts two Englishmen, three Yankees, two Scotchmen, two Welshmen, one Irishman, three Frenchmen, one Dutchman, one Austrian, three Spaniards, six Spanish Americans and half-breeds, two Indians from Chili (Chile), one Negro, one mulatto, twenty Italians, twenty Sandwich Islanders, and one Kanaka from the Marquesas, all sequestered in a tiny place, singing in turn their national anthems.
He meets an old African cook who falls in love with his pet pig; a Frenchman so huge he has to send to Hawaii for shoes; a perfect, almost comic-book specimen of “the thoroughbred English sailor;” the sadistic captain who struts and yells as he flogs; and “the most remarkable man I have ever seen,” who performs complex mathematical calculations in his head, and dead-reckons to within a whisker of the captain’s instruments. Especially endearing are the Kanakas, “the most interesting, in telligent, and kind-hearted people that I ever fell in with…. I
would have trusted my life and my fortune in the hands of any one of these people.”
I don’t want to take up too much more of your time, but I’ve got to tell you about one minor character, an innocuous fellow who got my curiosity running faster than any other. You won’t see him until the end of the book; even then you’ll wonder, Where did this guy come from? And that’s my point. This is the meek, mild, slightly nutty Professor Nuttall of Harvard, whom Dana had left “quietly seated in the chair of Botany and Ornithology, in Harvard University.” I wish Dana had told us more. Somehow the professor makes his way overland three thousand miles to the Pacific Northwest, in a time when there are no trains, no stagecoaches, not even a way station, let alone a town. He then hops a small vessel down to the trading post at Monterey. How he got through the Rocky Mountains, the hostile Indians, the wolves and rattlesnakes, the raging rivers, and the sparsity of 7-Elevens would make a fascinating story of its own. When Dana sees him again, the professor, whom the sailors dub “Old Curious,” is strolling hunched and barefoot along a beach in the settlement of San Diego, wearing a pea-coat, a wide straw hat, and his pants rolled up to his knees. He’s picking up rocks and shells and so far has collected enough of these and samples of flora to fill a dozen barrels.
We can sometimes measure the worth of a book by what we learn. Here are a few of the things Dana has taught me, which I will remember the next time I find myself on a long voyage at sea:
1) eat the pigs last, they’re better sailors
2) icebergs are a deep blue
3) “a ship is like a lady’s watch, always out of repair”
4) “Johnny” is sailor talk for shark
5) a whale-ship is called a “spouter”
6) “Jack” means any sailor, so, as in airports, the greeting “Hi, Jack!” will turn many heads
7) sailors got “three sheets in the wind” even back then
8) a little heads-up for the entrepreneur: According to Dana, “The Californians are an idle, thriftless people, and can make nothing for themselves. The country abounds in grapes, yet they buy bad wines made in Boston”
9) dark bruises and deep cuts must be ignored, others’ or your own, for any show of pity would look “sisterly”
10) corollary to #9: If you fall from the main royal staysail through rigging, spars, and yards, hit the deck and somehow survive, jump up quickly and say no more than something like “Whoa, that was interesting”
11) all letters must be read aloud to the entire crew under the forecastle
12) when carrying a hundred-pound hide on your head through the surf, make sure you’ve sewn a little piece of sheepskin to the inside of your hat
13) to get rid of pests like cockroaches, rats, and fleas, batten all the hatches and start a fire in the hold
14) if you’ve got something heavy to move, a good song will “put life and strength into every arm”
15) in a storm, sleep in a hammock, so when the ship rocks, you don’t
16) learn to sew; if you’re headed around the Horn, find a nice pattern for flannel underwear; make several pair
17) my favorite, which I have memorized: When you’re coming back around the Horn, and you hit fair weather on the other side—say, about the Falklands—and you’ve sprouted full sail in a steady southwester blowing up your taffrail, yell, “Hurrah, old bucket, the Boston girls have got hold of the tow-rope!”
Which reminds me. Dana, now on the Alert with her “snow-white, holystoned decks,” and everything “ship-shape and Bristol fashion,” still has to get back around the Horn. With forty thousand hides in her hold, thirty thousand horns, plus barrels of beaver and otter skins, four live bulls, a dozen sheep, more than a dozen pigs, and forty-some chickens, the Alert sails out of San Diego on May 8 (the height of spring in the northern hemisphere, but looking at late fall in the southern) with five months of ocean still ahead. One week out, they’ve traveled thirteen hundred miles. “Fine weather, day after day, without interruption,” records Dana. “Fair wind, and a plenty of it,—and homeward bound.”
Once past the Equator, they sail another twelve hundred miles in seven days. “Glorious sailing,” Dana describes it. “A steady breeze, light trade-wind clouds overhead, a clear sun by day, clear moon and stars at night.” As the north star falls from view, one sailor notes that the next time they see her, “We shall be standing to the northward, the other side of the Horn.” But with all of them calculating how long it will take to get home, one old salt reminds them, “You may see Boston, but you’ve got to ‘smell hell’ before that good day.” They did “smell hell,” and hell was frozen over. The Alert’s return trip around the Horn in the dead of winter inspired Dana to write some of the most memorable passages in literature.
Still a thousand miles from the latitude of Cape Horn, a huge sea buries the ship and sweeps everything forward of the mainmast: the galley, the pig-sty the hen-coop, and a large sheep-pen, all gone, “in the twinkling of an eye—leaving the deck as clean as a chin new-reaped—and not a stick left, to show where they had stood.” And that sea was not half what the Horn would blow their way.
Nearing the latitude of the Horn, they are seventeen hundred miles out to get enough “westing” to make a run at it, when they hit “rain, sleet, snow, and wind, enough to take our breath from us, and make the toughest turn his back to windward! The ship lay nearly over upon her beam-ends; the spars and rigging snapped and cracked; and her top-gallant masts bent like whip-sticks…. The decks were standing nearly at an angle of forty-five degrees, and the ship going like a mad steed through the water, the whole forward part of her in a smother of foam.”
Then come the icebergs, and here we read Dana at his best. “The sea in every direction was of a deep blue color, the waves running high and fresh, and sparkling in the light, and in the midst lay this immense mountain-island, its cavities and valleys thrown into deep shade, and its points and pinnacles glittering in the sun…. No description can give any idea of the strangeness, splendor, and, really, the sublimity, of the sight. Its great size;—for it must have been from two to three miles in circumference, and several hundred feet in height;—its slow motion, as its base rose and sank in the water, and its high points nodded against the clouds; the dashing of the waves upon it, which, breaking high with foam, lined its base with a white crust; and the thundering sound of the cracking of the mass, and the breaking and tumbling down of huge pieces…. This is the large iceberg; while the small and distant islands, floating on the smooth sea, in the light of a clear day, look like little floating fairy isles of sapphire.”
They’re still seven hundred miles west of the Horn, in the teeth of a gale, blowing from the east, pushing hail and sleet and fog so thick they can’t see half the length of the ship. Ice covers the ship, the hull, the spars, the standing rigging. Large hailstones cut their exposed hands and faces. A week goes by and nothing changes. “The yard over which we lay was cased with ice … the sail itself about as pliable as though it had been made of sheets of sheathing
copper. It blew a perfect hurricane, with alternate blasts of snow, hail, and rain. We had to fist the sail with bare hands. No one could trust himself to mittens, for if he slipped, he was a gone man…. We had need of every finger God had given us.”
They make it through, though, and the Boston girls grab hold of the tow rope, and several weeks later, in the stillness of Boston Harbor, from aloft comes swinging that “‘rough alley’ looking fellow, with … long hair, and face burnt as black as an Indian’s.” The transition is complete: from bewilderment to competence in a man’s world.
I love Dana’s book. I love the self-confidence, the curiosity, the resourcefulness, the sensitivity, that enabled him first to live the story and then to write it. What does he think of himself? As dangerous, lonely, alternately monotonous and terrifying as his adventure becomes, I think that after he pitches his sweetmeats overboard, deep inside he is proud of what he’s doing, because few young men from his patrician Boston background could survive the transformation. But he has too much character to stick it in a reader’s face. He reveals his pride only one time, and even there, curiously, critics have interpreted the passage I refer to as a lament. I see it as the opposite. I see Dana feeling superior, but having enough of a sense of humor to note the irony of the situation.
Here’s the setup: Still in Santa Barbara, Dana secures a stack of six-month-old Boston newspapers, in which he comes across a lengthy account of the Harvard commencement, including the graduation exercises of his own class. As he reads each name, he pictures their faces and their characters as he knew them earlier when he was one of them: “*****, handsome, showy, and superficial; ****, with his strong head, clear brain, cool self-possession; *****, modest, sensitive, and underrated; *****, the mouth-piece of the debating clubs, noisy, vaporous, and democratic…. Then I could see them receiving their A. Bs from the dignified, feudal-looking President, with his ‘auctoritate mihi commissâ,’ and walking off the stage with their diplomas in their hands; while, upon the very same day, their classmate was walking up and down California beach with a hide upon his head.”
EPILOGUE
Perhaps the most delightful part of the book is not a part of the book but a postscript written a quarter century later, when Dana returns to California. By now, argonauts with gold fever from all over the world have been rushing to California for a decade. Beginning in a luxurious, oceangoing sidewheel steamer departing New York, Dana’s trip has been cut to three weeks: five days down to Havana, a stay overnight in the harbor there, then on across the Caribbean Sea to Panama in four days, a half-day on the new railroad across the isthmus, and the remaining ten days aboard another steamer up the coast to San Francisco.
The contrast between sailing into San Francisco Bay in 1835 on a hide ship, and in 1859 aboard the steamer Golden Gate—“gay with crowds of passengers, and lighting the sea for miles around with the glare of her signal lights of red, green, and white, and brilliant with lighted saloons and staterooms”—boggles the mind, his and ours. Because in 1835, “the entire region of the great bay … was a solitude.” Now, “Clocks tolled the hour of midnight from its steeples, but the city was alive from the salute of our guns, spreading the news that the fortnightly steamer had come, bringing mails and passengers from the Atlantic world.” In the darkness, though, he can’t see much of the city, so at about two A.M. he finds a nice hotel, the Oriental, which stands, as near as he can tell, about a clam spit from the spot where he once tossed hides.
“When I awoke in the morning, and looked from my windows over the city of San Francisco, with its storehouses, towers, and steeples; its court-houses, theatres, and hospitals; its daily journals; its well-filled learned professions; its fortresses and lighthouses; its wharves and harbour, with their thousand-ton clipper ships, more in number than London or Liverpool sheltered that day … when I saw all these things, and reflected on what I once was and saw here, and what now surrounded me, I could scarcely keep my hold on reality at all.”
Nearly every San Franciscan he meets has read Two Years Before the Mast, because when President James K. Polk announced in his 1848 State of the Union speech that this new California territory we’d just acquired in the war with Mexico was nearly paved with gold, no one knew anything about it except a few ship captains and those who had read Dana’s book. It was in every sourdough’s rucksack, one of the staples of the Gold Rush.
Dana’s visits to the old haunts are immensely satisfying, but I’ve waxed blabbing far too long already. I’ll leave the pleasure of those discoveries for you. One last satisfaction: In the middle of his sojourn in San Francisco, Dana heads to the Sandwich Islands aboard a clipper ship, which at sea catches fire and burns to the waterline; he and others survive in lifeboats, are picked up by a passing bark, and sailed into Honolulu, where he establishes his base for three months to explore Hawaii. It’s comforting to know that now in middle age, Dana has lost not a whisper of his wanderlust or his curiosity.
——
GARY KINDER is the author of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. He lives in Seattle.
TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST
Crowded in the rank and narrow ship,—Housed on the wild sea with wild usages,—Whate’er in the inland dales the land conceals Of fair and exquisite, O! nothing, nothing, Do we behold of that in our rude voyage.
COLERIDGE’S WALLENSTEIN.
CHAPTER I
I am unwilling to present this narrative to the public without a few words in explanation of my reasons for publishing it. Since Mr. Cooper’s Pilot and Red Rover, there have been so many stories of sea-life written, that I should really think it unjustifiable in me to add one to the number without being able to give reasons in some measure warranting me in so doing.
With the single exception, as I am quite confident, of Mr. Ames’ entertaining, but hasty and desultory work, called “Mariner’s Sketches,” all the books professing to give life at sea have been written by persons who have gained their experience as naval officers, or passengers, and of these, there are very few which are intended to be taken as narratives of facts.
Now, in the first place, the whole course of life, and daily duties, the discipline, habits and customs of a man-of-war are very different from those of the merchant service; and in the next place, however entertaining and well written these books may be, and however accurately they may give sea-life as it appears to their authors, it must still be plain to every one that a naval officer, who goes to sea as a gentleman, “with his gloves on,” (as the phrase is,) and who associates only with his fellow-officers, and hardly speaks to a sailor except through a boatswain’s mate, must take a very different view of the whole matter from that which would be taken by a common sailor.
Besides the interest which every one must feel in exhibitions of life in those forms in which he himself has never experienced it; there has been, of late years, a great deal of attention directed toward common seamen, and a strong sympathy awakened in their behalf. Yet I believe that, with the single exception which I have mentioned, there has not been a book written, professing to give their life and experiences, by one who has been of them, and can know what their life really is. A voice from the forecastle has hardly yet been heard.
In the following pages I design to give an accurate and authentic narrative of a little more than two years spent as a common sailor, before the mast, in the American merchant service. It is written out from a journal which I kept at the time, and from notes which I made of most of the events as they happened; and in it I have adhered closely to fact in every particular, and endeavored to give each thing its true character. In so doing, I have been obliged occasionally to use strong and coarse expressions, and in some instances to give scenes which may be painful to nice feelings; but I have very carefully avoided doing so, whenever I have not felt them essential to giving the true character of a scene. My design is, and it is this which has induced me to publish the book, to present the life of a common sailor at sea as it really is,—the light and the dark t
ogether.
There may be in some parts a good deal that is unintelligible to the general reader; but I have found from my own experience, and from what I have heard from others, that plain matters of fact in relation to customs and habits of life new to us, and descriptions of life under new aspects, act upon the inexperienced through the imagination, so that we are hardly aware of our want of technical knowledge. Thousands read the escape of the American frigate through the British Channel, and the chase and wreck of the Bristol trader in the Red Rover, and follow the minute nautical manuvres with breathless interest, who do not know the name of a rope in the ship; and perhaps with none the less admiration and enthusiasm for their want of acquaintance with the professional detail.
In preparing this narrative I have carefully avoided incorporating into it any impressions but those made upon me by the events as they occurred, leaving to my concluding chapter, to which I shall respectfully call the reader’s attention, those views which have been suggested to me by subsequent reflection.
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